The Map and the Territory Read Online Free PDF

or in any case timeless; you could easily imagine her in a painting from the Middle Ages or the early Renaissance; on the other hand, it seemed implausible that she could have passed her teens in the 1960s, that she had ever owned a
transistor radio
or gone to
rock concerts
.
    During the first few years following her death, Jean-Pierre had tried to follow his son’s schoolwork, and had scheduled activities for the weekend at McDonald’s or the museum. Then, almost inevitably, the demands of his business had eclipsed them; his first contract in the domain of all-inclusive seaside resorts had been a stunning success. Not only had the deadlines and initial estimates been met—which was in itself relatively rare—but the construction also had been unanimously praised for its balance and respect for the environment. He had received ecstatic articlesin the regional press as well as in the national architectural reviews, and even a full page in the Styles section of
Libération
. At Port-Ambarès, it was written, he had managed to capture “the essence of the Mediterranean habitat.” In his view he had only lined up cubes of variable size, in uniform matte white, directly copied from traditional Moroccan buildings, then separated them with beds of oleanders. All the same, after this initial success, the orders had flooded in, and more and more often he was required to go abroad. When Jed reached the first year of secondary school, he decided to send him to board.
    He opted for the college at Rumilly, in the Oise, run by Jesuits. It was a private institution, but not one of those reserved solely for the elite: the fees remained reasonable, the teaching was not bilingual, and the sports facilities were nothing extravagant. The parents were not ultra-rich but rather conservative people from the old bourgeoisie (many were diplomats or in the military), though not fundamentalist Catholics; most of the time, the child had been put in boarding school after a divorce turned ugly.
    Although austere and unattractive, the buildings were reasonably comfortable; two to a room in the first years, the pupils had a private room once they reached fourth year. The strength of the establishment, the major plus in its portfolio, was the pedagogical support it offered each of its pupils. The rate of success at the baccalaureate had, since the establishment’s creation, always stayed above ninety-five percent.
    It was within these walls, and under the extremely dark canopies of pine trees in the park during long walks, that Jed spent his studious and sad teenage years. He didn’t complain about his lot, and couldn’t imagine any other. The fights between pupils were sometimes violent, the humiliations brutal and cruel, and Jed, being delicate and slight, would have been incapable of defending himself; but word spread that he was motherless, and such suffering, which none of them could claim to know, intimidated his schoolmates; thus there was around him a sort of halo of fearful respect. He didn’t have a single close friend, and didn’t seek the friendship of others. Instead, he spent afternoons in the library, and at the age of eighteen, having passed the baccalaureate, he had an extensive knowledge, unusual among the young people of his generation, of the literary heritage of mankind. He had read Plato, Aeschylus, and Sophocles; he had read Racine, Molière, and Hugo; he knew Balzac,Dickens, Flaubert, the German romantics and the Russian novelists. Even more surprisingly, he was familiar with the main dogmas of the Catholic faith, whose mark on Western culture had been so profound—while his contemporaries generally knew more about the life of Spider-Man than that of Jesus.
    This sense of a slightly old-fashioned seriousness was going to make a favorable impression on the teachers who had to examine his application for admission to the Beaux-Arts; they were obviously dealing with a candidate who was original, cultivated, serious, and